Tesla To Build Battery Backup For S Australia
By Paul Homewood
h/t Philip Bratby
Tesla to build world’s largest lithium ion battery in Australia, reports the BBC.
An Australian state will install the world’s largest lithium ion battery in a “historic” deal with electric car firm Tesla and energy company Neoen.
The battery will protect South Australia from the kind of energy crisis which famously blacked out the state, Premier Jay Weatherill said.
Tesla boss Elon Musk confirmed a much-publicised promise to build it within 100 days, or do it for free.
The 100-megawatt (129 megawatt hour) battery should be ready this year.
“There is certainly some risk, because this will be largest battery installation in the world by a significant margin,” Mr Musk said in Adelaide on Friday.
He added that “the next biggest battery in the world is 30 megawatts”.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-australia-40527784
The significant point here though is the capacity quoted:
100 MW or 129 MWh
In other words, enough to run for about 80 minutes.
Musk previously quoted a price of $250/KW, which works out at $25 million.
This only covers the cost of the batteries themselves. Including infrastructure and other costs,earlier estimates put the total cost as high as £125 million for 300 MW.
In the UK, the Capacity Market auction has yielded a price of £22.50/KW, on the face of it a much cheaper option. And standby capacity, such as CCGT, can provide back up power all day long, not just for an hour.
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Just more green virtue signalling, although I’m not quite sure what is green about a giant lithium battery.
The cash to buy it.
lol
Watch out Oz. You are dealing with the professional subsidy scammer. He knows how to separate fools from their taxes.
The fools are the ones spending the taxes, not the ones who contribute with no say..
But they do have a say in most industrialized countries. The watermelons may be lying about their motives and methods but their practices are well known to the voters who insist on greenies being given input on major policy issues.
“The significant point here though is the capacity quoted:
100 MW or 129 MWh
In other words, enough to run for about 80 minutes.”
The other factor is availability of ‘excess’ capacity to recharge it.
Over at Jo’s place a couple of days ago:
“Wind disappears in South Australia, costing wind-industry millions, BOM blames climate change even though models predicted faster winds”
“Where’s the wind gone? NEM-wide wind farm operation lowest in 5 years
Paul McArdle, WattClarity
“….we have to go back to April 2012 (just over 5 years ago) to see a lower aggregate production from wind. That’s truly astonishing. Considering that there have been many new wind farms commissioned in the 5 year period (like Hornsdale in July 2016 and Ararat in August 2016), it does beg two questions:
1) More academically, on a like-for-like basis, has the aggregate wind output ever been lower?
2) More practically (and very importantly), where has the wind gone, and why?
http://joannenova.com.au/2017/07/wind-disappears-in-south-australia-costing-wind-industry-millions-bom-blames-climate-change-even-though-models-predicted-faster-winds/
No mention of 80 minutes on the BBC world service blurb. Just that the battery would cover the needs of 30000 households and would be the size of half a football pitch
It used to be called the “Gore Effect”. I like to think it is Mother Nature with her wicked sense of humor.
Tesla ‘pyramid scam’ has a habit of issuing shiny press releases to cover bad news.
Yesterday its stocked dropped dramatically.
Truth is for last 3 quarters deliveries were lower than expected.
Hardly the exponential growth idea its stock price is based.
Oops Fat finger : 2 quarters
Always said it was a good stock to hedge as it was over-valued to dotcom levels.
PJW is claiming there’s a huge CO2 footprint in manufacturing a Tesla battery.
Is he right ?
\\Paul Joseph Watson @PrisonPlanet
Producing one battery for an electric car emits the equivalent CO2 of driving a gasoline engine for 8 years//
Just checked to see how they get the lithium
https://www.thebalance.com/lithium-production-2340123
And producing one battery for S Australia’s fragile grid emits the CO2 equivalent of running their last coal-fired power station for how long ?
And the pile of toxic waste at end of its life compares to running a nuclear power station for how long ?
I havn’t had time to look up the data, but someone must have, and I do believe they are relevant comparisons
There was a pie chart somewhere that showed how much of the retail price of a Model S was generously contributed by ‘Merkan taxpayers – as I understand it Tesla cars have yet to turn an actual profit…
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/"It must rankle with the other auto makers that they are forced to pay for Tesla…
The clueless ideologically drunken berks committing public money to this in Oz deserve an electoral spanking.
“The clueless ideologically drunken berks committing public money to this in Oz deserve an electoral spanking.”
Wouldn’t giving them a literal one prove much more entertaining?
Tesla is a fine example of the inverse Robin Hood principle. Robbing the poor to feed the rich!
oops…
There was a pie chart somewhere that showed how much of the retail price of a Model S was generously contributed by ‘Merkan taxpayers – as I understand it Tesla cars have yet to turn an actual profit…
<a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/#748d755d6f0a"It must rankle with the other auto makers that they are forced to pay for Tesla…
The clueless ideologically drunken berks committing public money to this in Oz deserve an electoral spanking.
I give up… 🙂
TomO,
Copy and past the text below it will work (honest)
There was a pie chart somewhere that showed how much of the retail price of a Model S was generously contributed by ‘Merkan taxpayers – as I understand it Tesla cars have yet to turn an actual profit…
<a href=” https://www.forbes.com/sites/patrickmichaels/2013/05/27/if-tesla-would-stop-selling-cars-wed-all-save-some-money/“> It </a > must rankle with the other auto makers that they are forced to pay for Tesla…
The clueless ideologically drunken berks committing public money to this in Oz deserve an electoral spanking.
http://blog.independent.org/2016/01/28/the-truth-about-tesla-motors/
@Tomo here you don’t need to put URLs in html
and when you rightclick over the time of a tweet to copy the URL
You can just paste it and the tweet shows up
Does anyone know what the working lifespan of such a battery would say compared to a CCGT? An important consideration surely when comparing costs.
Maybe it’ll be vaguely similar to their Powerwall warranty – 70% energy capacity retention at 10 years following initial installation date
https://www.tesla.com/sites/default/files/pdfs/powerwall/Powerwall_2_AC_Warranty_AUS-NZ_1-0.pdf
Reblogged this on Climate Collections.
and pigs might fly, TESLA kaput
https://seekingalpha.com/article/4086162-tesla-excuses-ludicrous-mode
It never ceases to amaze me how gullible almost all politicians are, particularly those in a position of influence. When will we get some politicians in charge who understand the issues surrounding the supply of electricity?
It’s their education that does it: Politics, Social Science, Marketing, Law, Public Administration, Women’s Studies … anything that can have as many right answers as required.
So 80 minutes after the wind stops and the connection overloads, Australia will be in the dark? For a mere $25 million plus in cost.
No there’s still “demand management”, a euphemism for the rolling blackout.
I always thought “rolling blackout” meant “power company failure”.
Wind power in South Australia tends to die for around 5-6 hours during heatwaves, so they will run the battery at only 20MW to cover that. They tend to shed load before the juice runs out entirely, otherwise the whole thing can go down.
So are you saying that they will only supply 7500 houses then?
I doubt that Tesla can actually complete the project in 100 days. Tesla has never, ever met a stated by date goal and often missed by years. I bet the disclaimers for the completion time absolve Tesla of everything including divine intervention.
Tesla make a ‘ Ludicrous’ version of one of their models. Seems it’s becoming a habit with this latest stunt.
Nobody’s mentioned that the amount of energy stored in such a “battery pack” must be something to worry about. Think how much damage Samsung’s dodgy ‘phone batteries did. Multiply that how many times?
Tesla Battery Bomb
This battery is not about trying to store power to cover for periods of low renewables output or a trip on the Heywood connector (which is 480MW of reliable coal fired power). It’s about providing rapid, second to second response to fluctuations in wind output now that South Australia has closed so much conventional capacity. It will spend most of its time squirting in small doses of power for a few seconds at a time in a bid to provide greater grid frequency stability, now that the inertia of rotating conventional generators is no longer available on the required scale. At most, it will provide some power in the matter of minutes it takes to fire up gas generation, or for extreme peak shaving.
It will reduce blackout risk a little – but it will do nothing to cope with more radical problems that have been behind South Australia’s state wide blackouts in recent times. We can look forward to it “failing” to prevent a statewide blackout probably within a couple of years at the most.
So it’s a band aid for a faulty designed system?
It doesn’t add up
Thanks for your comment. That makes sense. In fact, what you say does add up.
Build a system whose design guarantees periodic system failure ranging from small but seriously inconvenient failure to catastrophic collapse. Then build an extremely expensive add-on to cover up the noticeable performance signals indicating that the system is vulnerable to imminent system wide failure.
No rolling blackouts, just the occasional loss of the entire system. Then the painful process of rebooting system computers, setting thousands of sensors, safeties etc. back to default and then registering the results in the correct manner with the overall system command and control process.
Naturally settled science says that anyone who questions the wisdom of such a project is an ignorant fool and likely guilty of committing a crime against humanity.
You have to contend with batteries have so many charge and discharges before they no longer work. If his battery is charged and then discharged 80 percent daily, the battery will only go through 1800 cycles. Then you have a piece of toxic junk
The largest ‘energy storage’ unit I am aware of was made in the 1970’s. It is the Raccoon Mt. Pump Storage facility.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raccoon_Mountain_Pumped-Storage_Plant
“The plant has a capacity of 1,652 megawatts (2,215,000 hp) of electricity and can generate for up to 22 hours.”
I did some work on it a couple months ago. Cool place.